Retirement of a Supreme Court injustice

The Rev. Dr. Rick Scarborough, president of Vision America and chairman of the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration, writes today of Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement.

SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR’S REAL RECORD
The liberal media is praising her to the sky as a moderate and centrist who brought balance to the Supreme Court. Democrats like New York’s ultra-liberal Charles Schumer are saying they expect the president to pick someone just like her to fill the vacancy on the high court.

Why is Sandra Day O’Connor receiving such fulsome praise from the left? A look at her real record makes it easy to discern. From a constitutionalist perspective, O’Connor–one of Ronald Reagan’s two worst mistakes (the other being Justice Anthony Kennedy)–was an unmitigated disaster.

This so-called swing vote swung to the left more often than not. In the Court’s two recent Ten Commandments cases, O’Connor voted with the majority to ban displays in Kentucky courthouses, and voted with the minority, which wanted to prohibit a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol.

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, she provided the crucial fifth vote to uphold Roe v. Wade, thus assuring the ongoing slaughter of unborn children. In Stenberg v. Carhart, she found that the Constitution protects the hideous practice of partial-birth abortions.

O’Connor also discovered a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), a right she herself said did not exist in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986).

Sandra Day O’Connor seemed to think interpreting the Constitution meant balancing competing interests and splitting the difference (Washington wags said she’d resolve the Ten Commandments dispute by declaring the first 5 constitutional, and the rest not)–which amounts to managing the sweeping social revolution which the court’s majority unleashed, beginning with the Warren Court.

By all accounts, she is a gracious and charming person. As a Republican-appointee to the highest court in the land, she left much to be desired.

I read an Associated Press article that referred to Justice O’Connor as “generally conservative.” Only in the eyes of liberal anti-constitutionalists could she be seen thus.